Lost
by Sheera Azm
Summary: Their city lives, yet they will not return.


They were lucky, to find a world that would take them without asking much questions. They tried the developed worlds first, but they tend to be wary of strangers. And the more advanced a world was, the more likely it would be culled. Finally, seeking peace, now that their world had been shattered, they retreated to a small world, recently visited by the wraith, for only such worlds offer safety now. Safety, in having too few people to matter.

It was a small farming community, and welcomes any willing workers. They took an abandoned house, and set to live the rest of their natural life in meditation and a simple life, for they have little else but the hope to one day rejoin their lost people among the stars. The work was unfamiliar, but they kept to it, and after the many months they were no longer stranger to the community. Already the suggestions Natean made had been accepted, and work on building a bridge had begun, cutting their commute to the gate shorter. The river runs hard in spring, and some had been reluctant to rebuild a bridge that might just come down yet again.

Part of her scoffs at them, for the old bridges had seemed of flimsy, unsound construction, when it was described, but a part of her was saddened, as for all the technology her world had possessed, it was now beyond her reach.

Along the bend of the road (_dirt_ track, her mind insisted), a cart came, and she stood at the door, watching, until it was close enough to greet. Natea jumped down and waved to the driver before turning and walking into the front yard and hugging her, and gave her the basket he had taken from the cart.

There was some cloth in the basket he gave her, fine woven cloth that was much better than the simple wear that was all they had afforded in the market. Her heart leaped, as underneath it was a small bag of coins. It had been a few hard months.

"How? Our share of the farm isn't worth this much." she asked.

"There were traders, and I was told that they sought the relics of the ancestors more than they sought food," Natean's lips twisted in a wry smile. "I gave them a spare power cube – the one we are using would last hundreds of years, given how little we are using it."

"Others had come seeking our technology before, yet you did not do this."

"The Genii. I found them too arrogant. These people, they are Lanteans."

She gasped. "From the city? Our people are saved?"

"They have taken back the city, but we are the last. I cloaked the gate ship and waited by the gate. When they left, it was to Atlantis." Natean was pulling out his tablet, and set it on the small table, "The gate was open for less than a minute, but I got the complete record of the gate room from we left to now. It was our luck that the Lanteans do not tamper much with the system. My normal codes do not work, but one of the mantainance codes do."

The projected image showed the gate room, and their cursed children all around it. "They are about to raise the shield – the Lanteans made them believe that one of their ships had come to destroy the city."

Suddenly, without warning, each and every of the abomination crumbled into dust on the floor.

"The Lanteans had a weapon against them." she said, feeling faint. Would the fate of her people be different had Hela accepted the Lanteans' offer of help? The Lanteans had not crossed her mind ever since they fled from their infected city. _Replicator, _the Lantean had called their accursed children. They had a word for it, it would stand that they knew more that the Alterans do about the form their abandoned experiment had chose to take. Augustria and Eanas was the last of her people she had seen, in the ship bay, crumpled down from stunner shots and left behind. "Vrrdyn said that they seemed to be the descendants of our people that had left for Terra." she said, blankly. "The city mourned and missed them."

"Vrrdyn was seldom wrong in such matter, and it would have been better if Hela had listened to her. The war had made her, all of us, bitter, and so we banished our people's descendants, and so doomed ourselves."

She missed the city, missed her people, but even though the city lives, strangers walked Atlantis' halls now. "They might welcome us, but there is nothing for us there anymore, is there?"

Natean tightened his hands around her, as he did the first few frantic weeks, finding ruins on worlds by worlds by worlds, until they came to their senses and accepted that their people are truly gone. "No, there is none. We cannot return."


End file.
